Red Bull Racing
Max Verstappen dug in for a brilliant Emilia Romagna Grand Prix victory on Sunday as he held off a late charge from McLaren’s Lando Norris with Mexican teammate Sergio Pérez eighth.
Verstappen started on pole position and cruised through the first two-thirds of the race before Norris started to make up time, leading to a nervous last lap where the Dutchman managed to hold his nerve.
Oracle Red Bull Racing’s Pérez started on hard tyres and ran into the gravel at Rivazza but recovered to bank eighth, while Japanese driver Tsunoda completed an encouraging weekend with a point in 10th.
Verstappen now holds a 48-point lead over Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc, with Pérez 54 points back heading into the iconic Monaco Grand Prix next weekend.
Max Verstappen, Driver, Red Bull Racing
It was a close race today. I didn’t expect that the car would have that kind of pace at the beginning, which was nice, and we were strong on the medium tyres. When we swapped to the hard tyres, it was a bit trickier to drive and more of a struggle to bring it to an end as the tyres fell out of the operating window, and we had a really low grip. During the last 10 laps, I was really trying to survive on the tyres and managed to keep Lando behind, but it required a lot of focus as we were on the limit with the penalty. However, we managed to work through and take the win; I was definitely counting down the laps until the end, and it was a great feeling when we took the chequered flag! If you look at where we were at the beginning of the weekend, this was an extremely good result. There is a bit of work to do and things to analyse, but we are looking forward to Monaco.
Sergio Pérez, Driver, Red Bull Racing:
We knew it was going to be a hard day today as the whole weekend was compromised from qualifying. Imola is a difficult track to overtake on, so this was the maximum we could do today, especially since we were struggling with traffic in the beginning on my first stint and on the hard tyres, we had no margin to play around with the balance. We knew that McLaren was the fastest, but Max had one of the best weekends I’ve seen from him in a while, so a lot of praise for that and this was a great result for us. We have a few things we need to analyse and certainly some work to do as we head into the next race, but I’m looking forward to Monaco, and hopefully, we will continue our strong season and get some good momentum back.
JODY EGGINTON, Technical Director, Red Bull Racing
It’s nice to come away with a point from Yuki, but there’s also a slight feeling of frustration as we had the pace to possibly be further up the road at the end of the race. However, we lost places with both cars off the start, and that pushed us into making an earlier-than-planned stop to try and recover, meaning we had to go longer than we wanted on the second set of tyres. That opened up the opportunity for Stroll to go long with less traffic, and he took good advantage of this. On the positive side, the car and recent updates worked well here, and it’s been a fantastic effort from everyone at the factory supplying new parts. It was good to see so many of them here with us, celebrating in the grandstands after all their hard work.
